Sunday Series: Theme Parks’ Not-So-Smooth Ride

This week's mention for March fast movers is hopefully one that will have you thinking about summer vacation. Read up on why the Theme Park category made its way to the top -- but also how a variety of reasons can impact online traffic.

This week’s mention for March fast movers is hopefully one that will have you thinking about summer vacation. Read up on why the Theme Park category made its way to the top — but also how a variety of reasons can impact online traffic.

March marks the ideal time to start building summer travel itineraries, so it’s understandable that all of the top ten sites saw month-over-month growth in unique visitors.

More intriguing is the category’s performance year-over-year, as several of the top ten actually saw YoY declinesin unique visitor count. SeaWorld’s websites are especially interesting — only the SeaWorld brand-specific landing page saw YoY growth, while their parent company’s seaworldparks.com and buschgardens.comsaw losses in unique visitors.

Why might that be?

Following the July 2013 release of “Blackfish” (a documentary against killer whale captivity), the theme park has been fighting to maintain a good reputation. But March saw a follow-up from a California bill to end orca captivity — and it’s likely that bad press is also feeding into SeaWorld’s MoM and YoY growth.

However, understanding web traffic is also important when following triumphs! Legoland.com sees strong MoM and YoY unique visitor increases for March — one month after the blockbuster release of the Lego Movie and the park’s new display of the official film set, now in Legoland California.

It’s imperative that companies look at behavioral data to see what brings consumers to their webpage. The numbers may be growing, but more information tells whether that’s good or bad.

About Johanna Gunawan:A Political Science/International Affairs sophomore at Northeastern University, Johanna joins Millward Brown Digital as the spring '14 Digital Marketing Co-op. Apart from her interest in digital infrastructure and her majors; Johanna enjoys absurd quantities of imported coffee, haggling for cheap flights, and constantly editing her website. Find her on Twitter, Google+, or LinkedIn.